Finding Home

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a blog by Keith Ferrazzi, marketing guru and well known author of Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. He had a poignant post, a tribute to his Aunt Rose, who had died that very day. Keith wrote of flying back home to spend some time with her in her final hours. He wrote of what her life had been like, how she had touched so many people in her lifetime and how much he appreciated her for what she meant to him, his family and his community. He wondered if it were his final hours he was facing, how would he want to spend them? That led him to find a nutritionist at the nursing home who happened to have a guitar. Along with her, he and his family spent Aunt Rose’s remaining time sitting at her bedside, singing Christmas carols.

I was moved by the fact that Keith took the time to record his experiences, that very day, in his blog. The people who read his blog, friends and family, can share first hand what he felt and experienced, what the world looked like from his view. If he had written the blog a week later, some of the details would have been lost. Another month and he would have covered the high points but may have forgotten some of the poignancy of the moment. This is one of the things I love about blogging and digital journals. Years from now, family members can read that post as if it had just happened. We get an intimate look at Keith’s world, through his eyes, in a format that is easily shared and easily posted.

What particularly touched me about Keith’s blog was how he found “home” during this experience.

“I walked out of the room briefly to stretch my legs and looked out the window. The ground and sky was white with so much snow. And it wasn’t just falling, it seemed to swirl up and all around those tiny mining-town houses. And it was beautiful. I wasn’t thinking “Why do people live here?” I was thinking, “In so many ways, I belong here.” I was feeling what it means to be “a Ferrazzi.” And I felt more peace than I had for quite some time. I felt blessed to be there.”

These days, most of us are wanderers, our souls homesick for a sense of belonging. We often spend our time looking for a way to find “home”, the place we belong. When we are able to connect our pasts with who we are in the present, we can develop a strong sense of relatedness; to our family and friends as well as our purpose in life. I recommend you find Home this holiday season. Take the time to create, recognize and record the moments that have meaning for you and your family. Moments that will be remembered years from now as “those were the days.”

By the way, Keith’s book, Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, is hands-down the best networking book around. Whether you have been around the block a few times or are fresh out of college and looking to get connected, Keith provides tip after valuable tip on creating value based relationships that blur the line between business acquaintance and friend.

WELCOME

Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations.Read more about Stefani...

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QUOTES

"The stories that we tell ourselves function to order our world, serving both a foundation upon which each of us constructs our sense of reality and filter through which we process each event that confronts us every day. The values that we cherish and wish to preserve, the behavior that we wish to censure, the tears and dread that we can barely confess in ordinary language, the aspirations and goals that we most dearly prize--all of these things are encoded in the stories that each culture invents and preserves for the next generation, stories that, in effect, we live by and through."Henry Louis Gates Literary Critic, Scholar, Writer and Teacher Chair: African American Studies at Harvard University

“In truth a family is what you make it. It is made strong, not by number of heads counted at the dinner table, but by the rituals you help family members create, by the memories you share, by the commitment of time, caring, and love you show to one another, and by the hopes for the future you have as individuals and as a unit.” The Single-Parent Family: Living Happily in a Changing World by Marge Kennedy and Janet Spencer King. New York: Crown, 1994

“By looking into another person’s life, you need to look into your own. Whether you are the biographer or whether you are the reader. It’s like truth is stranger than fiction. When I am reading a biography, there is something more rewarding about reading about a real person’s life, rather than fiction.” On Writing Biographies: Kevin Fitzpatrick interviews Marion Meade about Buster, Woody, Zelda, and Mrs. Parker for Small Spiral Notebook

“The art of interviewing is as personal as the art of writing. Every reporter brings a different demeanor and skill to the job of interviewing ... But all interviews are designed to accomplish one mission: Get information to advance a story. This is best achieved with organization and preparation, whether it's a five-minute phone interview or a two-hour confrontational affair.” Les Zaitz, Senior Investigative Reporter for The Oregonian from his tip sheet on interviewing

"The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn’t discover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip."Leon Edel, U.S. biographer, critic. Interview in Writers at Work, Eighth Series

"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it."Rabbi Harold Kushner

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it."Benjamin Disraeli

"All the natural history required to understand consciousness is now readily available in evolutionary biology and psychology. Gene networks organize themselves to produce complex organisms whose brains permit behavior; further evolution enriches the complexity of those brains so that they can create sensory and motor maps that represent the environments they interact with; additional evolutionary complexity allows parts of the brain to talk to each other (figuratively speaking) and generate maps of the organism interacting with its environment. Within the frame of those interactions, the conversation among the maps spontaneously and continuously tells the "story" of our organism responding to and being modified by the environment. (The story is first told without words and is later translated into language when language becomes available, both in biological evolution and in every one of us.)" Antonio Damasio
A Story We Tell Ourselves
Time Magazine 1/18/2007

"In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage - to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness." Alex Haley, Roots

"We must remember that a photograph can hold just as much as we put into it, and no one has ever approached the full possibilities of the medium." Ansel Adams

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”Dickens, David Copperfeild,
p. 2 1850 edition

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?Mary Oliver - The Summer Day

“Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.”Harlan Ellison

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."John Lennon

"When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. She was always interested in that. I wanted some researchers I'd worked with to talk to my mother, but my mother was a little antsy about it. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids. "Robert de Niro, quoted in Esquire

WELCOME

Stefani Twyford is a video biographer in Houston Texas whose mission is to help families, individuals, companies and organizations chronicle history, share life stories, connect generations and preserve their legacies in timeless, high-quality multimedia presentations.Read more about Stefani...